Wanted
by NDV
Summary: follows Ace of Hearts and Wounded series


Wanted Lizaausten@tri-countynet.net  
  
This follows Wounded (4 parts) and Ace of Hearts. Again with the CJ/Mandy and I don't own them disclaimer. Also, you might want to have seen or at least know what happened with Rosslyn via What Kind of Day It Has Been, and In the Shadow of Two Gunmen (hint: Josh and the President got shot, Sam saved CJ's life, and everybody's a little worse for the wear). Oh yes, and as always, the lyrics are still from the song Please Forgive Me, by Melissa Etheridge. Talking about a good beat.  
  
This one's for M and S, because writer's block has never been so enjoyable. Thanks for finding me.  
  
Thanks to Randi for her continued patience, and Mickey for her everlasting friendship. And Nana, because you gave me a foundation on which to build.  
  
  
  
Wanted  
  
She'd arrived at the door with a box in her hands and the weight of Rosslyn pressing into the delicate spine and smooth skin of her back, burning the tears from her eyes and the smile from her lips. She'd not rung the doorbell or tapped against the door, only stood there, waiting and wondering if she was doing the right thing, trying to decide what exactly it was she was doing.  
  
Mandy'd found her there, barely leaning against the doorframe, face pressed into the cool wood of the door, box still held tilted between painfully thin fingers, ragged fingernails leaving semicircular imprints on the cardboard.  
  
"CJ?" she'd asked, swiping a hand through still-wet tendrils of hair, suddenly conscious of her state of undress, robe gaping open at the neck. Eyes rose to meet eyes though the taller of the two did not speak.  
  
"Come on," the brunette finally spoke, moving to her side and guiding her forward with a hand at her back, an attempt to push away the rest of the world and Rosslyn too. "Sit down," she urged, voice barely a whisper, and CJ mechanically obeyed, dropping the box on the glass coffee table before her as she sank into the cushions. "Are you okay?"  
  
Eyes again lifted sharply, lips parted, and Mandy awaited the formidable words she knew were to follow. Of course CJ was okay, she was CJ: unbreakable, unbendable, oh-so-intelligent and beautiful, and always, always fine. Mandy lowered herself into the cushion beside the Press Secretary, quickly leaning forward to catch the whisper she knew would soon come forth.  
  
It did not, and her lips again pursed, forehead wrinkling in confusion and sadness. Her head moved back and forth, tears slowly filling her eyes. For once, she had allowed herself to nearly fall, allowed herself to break.  
  
"Were you hurt?" Mandy whispered, letting a hand trail to the left, covering slender fingers and ragged fingernails.  
  
"No," she finally whispered, eyes falling shut as she sucked in a breath. "Josh..."  
  
"I know," she nodded, leaning forward yet again, allowing her other hand to trail upward, pushing aside a wayward strand of hair. "I know."  
  
"Of course," the blond allowed, a hint of bitterness in the short laughter that burst forth. "You watch CNN."  
  
"But you were there, CJ."  
  
"I know," head falling forward and lips tightly pursed, "it's different when you're playing the game... out on the field. I kept wondering if that was what... what the people in that box in Ford Theatre thought over a hundred years ago. The President... they didn't even know, until he was in the limo. And he was just worried about his daughter, Mandy. He just wanted to make sure Zoey was alive." The words swirled before them like rivers of colored glass - jumbled and bright and beautifully wound, but empty and sharp when broken, when felt.  
  
"What's this?" she questioned, indicating the inconspicuous looking brown box that had been set on her coffee table. She watched the other woman shrug, circling her hand through the air then pointing toward it. With a contemplative smile, she lifted the lid and removed the paper that lay atop the multitude of pieces inside. "A puzzle?" Mandy asked, looking from the paper to the almost-friend before her.  
  
CJ cocked her head to the side, smiled sadly even as the tears receded once again, "You mentioned once, on the campaign trail, that you had loved puzzles as a child."  
  
Mandy's hands trailed along the edges of the glossy paper, "This is the puzzle?"  
  
"Yes."  
  
"The White House," she nodded. "It's very appropriate." Her eyes drifted upward in an attempt to catch the Press Secretary's expression.  
  
"It's us," CJ shrugged, shoulders again falling forward in a slump, Rosslyn and Josh and President Josiah Bartlet pressing against her back, the metallic taste of blood, the feel of hot cement, and the imminence of all of the things she could not remember piercing her heart as if one of Athene's bronzed arrows.  
  
"Cold and imperial on the outside, cozy and loud on the inside?" Mandy offered, boldly sitting higher, hand poised in the air just above the back of the sofa, inches from disheveled blond hair.  
  
"That's not exactly what I had in mind, but if it's what you prefer to think..." CJ attempted humor, failing miserably, then offered her a somber almost-grin. "You're the only one who wasn't there, you're the only one who can still remember what it's like outside of blood and gunshots and people falling around and above you. It's just you, untainted and... still beautiful and charmed."  
  
"I'm not one of you anymore, CJ. I'm not part of the White House or the Bartlet Administration. I walked away from that because I was given no other choice," Mandy reminded her, voice soft but double edged. Her hand darted forward, fingers barely stroking a stray lock of hair.  
  
"You had a choice," she barked, "you took the easy way out and you left us all there, dangling. There were only two women in the administration with positions that count in the long run, and you left," CJ paused, unconsciously leaning into the hand near the back of her head. "You left me alone there."  
  
"I didn't leave you, CJ, I'm still sitting right here," Mandy offered, running the fingertips of her spare hand lightly against the lean arm, tracing shoulder and neck and jaw, the glossy image the puzzle would create laying still and silent in her lap. "Come here," she whispered, leaning forward, hands falling, pulling her into an embrace that would no longer allow her to hide her tears.  
  
CJ attempted to rare backward much like an injured animal, pushing against the thin shoulders but finding them unyielding. "I should go, I shouldn't..."  
  
"No, you should stay. It's okay to not be fine, CJ. Nobody's going to know but me, and you've seen me 'not fine' on a few occasions too, you know."  
  
"I always come to you when I'm like this," she argued, "when I'm falling apart."  
  
"*I* always go to *you* when you're hurting, but I've never seen you fall apart. Now shut up and let me comfort, would you?" Mandy groused, pulling her closer and nuzzling her head against the junction of neck and shoulder.  
  
CJ's laughter was quiet and tired but no longer bitter, and she buried her own head against her companion's, wondering exactly what she'd been thinking and why she'd come to the only one left unmarred by racists and showers of gunfire.  
  
But there was just something about Mandy that kept her coming back, made her seek comfort in what she could not have, and she fought the urge to trace Mandy's lips with her own fingers as she pulled away. There was a grace in the way she carried herself and a beauty in the way her eyes danced and burned, a sincerity in her that Washington could not afford.  
  
"D'you still like puzzles?" she asked, finally, touching the paper still laying across her legs, "I mean..."  
  
"Yes, CJ, I still like puzzles," Mandy smiled, patting the back of a slender hand before leaning forward and overturning the box. "Shall we?"  
  
"Uhm," she paused, eyes flitting across the room, "I probably..."  
  
"I have a spare room," the brunette shrugged, "and I have it on good authority that Bartlet's going to have the Secret Service keep you from the White House tomorrow, barring any national disasters."  
  
"How did you...?" CJ's eyes narrowed, expression growing suspicious as Mandy fought back her own grin.  
  
"If you didn't come to me, I was going to find you. Granted we'd be missing one puzzle, but... you're my friend, CJ. I talked to Toby, he told me you were hurting, breaking. He gave me his, ahem, permission, to try to help you, let you fall where you wouldn't shatter."  
  
"Oh," she nodded, suspicion falling away as if it were a cloak, and leaned forward, flipping pieces upward so that the cut image could be seen. "Thank you."  
  
"Yeah," Mandy replied, readjusted the neck of her robe as she stood, "you get started and I'll go... change into, you know, something a little more appropriate."  
  
"Don't get dressed on my account," she threw back a moment later, and listened as Mandy's footsteps halted almost immediately at the base of the stairs.  
  
"Now that's the CJ I know and love," Mandy chuckled, raking her hand again through the now dry strands of hair, then continuing up the stairs. "She's going to kill me one of these days," she grinned to herself, dropping the robe, "if Toby doesn't do it first."  
  
Moments later, dressed in a pair of plain pajamas and heading down the stairs, she glanced over the lines of CJ's back and the planes of her body, noting that she seemed to be breathing again. Rosslyn would not suffocate her, Mandy knew, but eventually something else would come along, and she would shatter, fall, drown.  
  
But, Toby had reluctantly reminded Mandy minutes before she'd found the Press Secretary at her door, CJ had offered her something so many months ago somewhere between bars and poker games, something he'd never had the pleasure of knowing. She'd offered her truths and her secrets, and in return, Mandy had given herself.  
  
When that gift, something else came along, a sort of responsibility, he had told her.  
  
CJ would not drown because, for once, she would not be alone.  
  
"You know, CJ," she began, walking around the sofa, "at the risk of slaughtering a very worthy quote, life is like a jigsaw puzzle..."  
  
It's been so long since I've touched So long since I wanted Then you made me laugh And my heart opened 


End file.
